Free Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics by Jonathan Wilson

Chapman was approached by Huddersfield Town to become assistant to their manager Ambrose Langley, who had played alongside his late brother Harry before the war. Chapman was intrigued and appealed to the FA, noting that he had been away from the club working at the Barnbow arms factory when the supposed illegal payments had been made.
    The FA showed mercy, Chapman took up the post, and when Langley decided a month later that he would rather be running a pub, he found himself installed as manager. He advised the directors that they had a talented young squad, but that they needed ‘a general to lead them’. Clem Stephenson of Aston Villa, he decided, was just the man. Stephenson was thirty-three and, crucially given Chapman’s belief in the value of counter-attacking, had developed a way of breaking the offside trap by dropping into his own half before springing forward. Performances and gates improved rapidly while Chapman, always looking at the bigger picture, re-turfed the pitch and renovated the press seats at Leeds Road. In 1922, despite their stuffed donkey mascot catching fire in the celebrations that followed the semi-final victory over Notts County, Huddersfield won the FA Cup, Billy Smith converting a last-minute penalty in the final at Stamford Bridge to see off Preston North End.
    The authorities, though, were not impressed. The game had been a poor one, littered with niggling fouls, leading the FA to convey its ‘deep regret’ at the behaviour it had witnessed and to express a hope that ‘there will not be any similar conduct in any future final tie’. Huddersfield asked what was meant, to which the FA replied that the club should recognise indecency when it saw it, the lack of clarification prompting many to believe that Chapman was being censured for having deployed his centre-half, Tom Wilson, deeper than usual so that, in the words of the Huddersfield Examiner , he acted as ‘a great spoiler’.
    It is impossible at this remove to determine whether the FA had anything so specific in mind, but again what is apparent is the perception that there was a ‘right way to play’ from which Chapman was deemed to have deviated. Equally, the deployment of Wilson with a brief, if not to man-mark, then certainly to check Billy Roberts, the opposing centre-forward, suggests that the stopper centre-half was on its way, and may have come into existence even without the change in the offside law.
    There were other isolated incidents of clubs fielding their centre-half with a specific defensive brief - Queen’s Park, for instance, in danger of being overwhelmed by Rangers in a Glasgow Charity Cup tie in 1918, dropped Bob Gillespie back into what was effectively a central defensive role - but what was unique about Chapman’s Huddersfield was less the willingness to deploy the centre-half defensively as the fact that they developed a distinctive style, based around their manager’s distrust of the wing play that was so revered in Britain. Inside passing, Chapman argued, was ‘more deadly, if less spectacular’ than the ‘senseless policy of running along the lines and centring just in front of the goalmouth, where the odds are nine to one on the defenders’. As the Examiner noted in 1924 after Huddersfield had wrapped up the league title, ‘the low passing and the long-field play of the Leeds Road team has become famous.’
    What was significant was not merely that Chapman had a clear conception of how football should be played, but that he was in a position to implement that vision. He was - at least in Britain - the first modern manager, the first man to have complete control over the running of the club, from signings to selection to tactics to arranging for gramophone records to be played over the public-address system to keep the crowd entertained before the game and at half-time. With Huddersfield on their way to defending their title in 1925, the Sporting Chronicle asked: ‘Do clubs realise to the full